Paul Parish

fantastic report, Leigh-- on top of all that, it clarifies the situation re the Kirov here -- he conducted 2/3 of the show on Tuesday night, made the receptin and hit his marks in photo ops with major donors, and was on a 5 AM plane back in hte morning.... I'm not actually complaining -- it's just staggering what an enterprise like that has to do to survive -- the Firebird overture pretty much fell apart the next night, and without Gergiev to tell the story, Nioradze went shrieking across the sky in the gaudiest, ugliest performance I've ever seen; she looked like Maria Shriver... terrible strain in her shoulders and neck, even before the tsarevitch caught her -- she looked broken a all her joints, very turned in, harsh glissades, and a grotesque distortion of her face like a Trockadero in full cry. The audience laughed at first, but since she was serious they gave it up, and in fact lots of people went along with the perfornmance....When she pointed her finger, you could clearly understand she was saying go get htat box from behind the tree -- she DOES have a fantastic ability to communicate..... She also has a miraculous balance. But her dancing was so ugly, full-bore, untempered, I was beside myself...

THere's a real fun thread gonig caled "Where would I be without ballet?" Maybe we could start wone 'what would I do without "Ballet Alert"?' Congratulations, Alexandra, and THANK YOU! And thank you ALL....

WONDERFUL report, Drew -- THANK YOU!!!!

Do the y make them like that any more? Actually, Dowell wasn't first cast by any means -- hardly even born yet -- but can anyone have been more beautiful in the role?

Thanks, Mel -- I didn't realize that - maybe the influence went the other way, and Cranko had some influence on Zefirelli, then -- Zefirelli certainly worked a great deal in opera houses... I'm really just reporting on a feeling I have, I haven't done any research -- maybe it's just the influence of the youth culture of hte 60's or maybe it's the way the ballet has developed since Cranko's death -- which was itself tragically early -- But to me the characters of the young lovers seem radically younger and more fluid than in Lavrovsky's version, as they so powerfully do in Zefirelli's movie version..... (By the way, I recommend to anybody checking out hte old HOllywood ROmeo and Juliet with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer: Shearer is truly great in the role -- look how she takes the potion -- and Howard is the only ROmeo I've ever seen who's an intellectual, as Romeo actually is in hte play.....)

Treefrog, What you will NOT get from any version of Romeo and Juliet is movement like Sleeping Beauty's. Prokofieff's music is too frothy: the dancing will be larger and looser and there will be large swathes where Romeo or Juliet will just run around the stage -- the music sweeps and pulses and rushes like water over rocks, so any choreographer will have to open up the steps and make long long phrases, and find pretexts in the balcony scene for one dancer to stop and just WATCH the other (so they can in fact get their wind back, for it's 10 or eleven minutes long). The music is so beautiful and exciting it can be played , and often is, by a symphony orchestra as a concert, with nothing to look at but the musicians playing, but it is really more like movie music than a ballet score in some respects. The Stuttgart was just here recently performing it, so I've just seen it within the last 3 months -- As Alexandra says, like Macmillan's, Cranko's is based on Lavrovsky's -- though it's ALSO based (unlike Lavrovsky's) on Zefirelli's movie. The lovers are conceived as VERY YOUNG, in the first flush of hormones -- it's much sexier than Lavrovsky's, and considerably less heroic. Lavrovsky's Juliet is a tragic heroine, immensely intelligent, aware of the full scope of what's going on; Cranko's and Macmillan's versions are more pathetic -- or let's say, it stresses the tenderness and the pathos -- these are just kids, like the boys being sent to Vietnam (which is when the ballet dates from).... charming, marvelous, wonderful kids, but they don't have the human stature that Ulanova had. That said, the Stuttgart's version is one where the steps do not get in he way of the dramatic action. Aside from a staggering series of double tours for the three boys just before they enter the Capulet's ball, most of the ballet is technically not virtuosic -- which means that the dancers have plenty of energy to put into characterization. The choreography is effective and spectacular; a really smart use of two levels of the stage-- there's an upper level where much happens -- people look down on the street fighting, and the funeral procession uses it to tremendous effect. The scene that's closest to Lavrovsky's is the ball scene -- though none other comes close to the power of Lavrovsky's in depicting the crushing social forces arrayed against Romeo and Juliet, the grasping hand of Capulet, which sticks out overhead in Lavrovsky's staging characterizes a power structure no less cruel than Stalin's.... But Cranko's dance of the Knights is a tremendous thing, also. I Wonder what you'll think. I'm sure the Joffrey will do the ballet justice, and I only wish I could be there to see the performance. Please let us all know what you think.

Estelle, I've often wondered how Karin Averty fared after she returned to Paris after a couple of years at the San Francisco Ballet, where she was an immensely charming dancer, very well-liked by many critics and by the public. I have to say I was one of those who did not like her in everything -- and in the second movement of Symphony in C I found her disappointing -- so beautiful and elegant that she raised fantastic hopes, which then were not satisfied, for she was not musical.

o he's tremendous -- I can't remember the name of hte book I read, but it was about the incredible moral complexities created by apartheid , up to iand including people spying on each other, denouncng each other, imprisonment, torture, all to maintain a politico-social surface of calm and order -- like Darkness at Noon. crossed with Dostoyevsky and Faulkner -- the way the society worked is pprofoundly understood, and the way the individual psyche worked is just as deep....... tremendous book ,and though it was very violent and frightening, it wasn't depressing....

Carbro, dear, you're not being picky -- we do en dedans pirouettes like that in sally's class, but she acknowledges that it's "with a fouette"-- My next question was going to be "is it still a sissonne if you spring from two feet to one foot from an open position (i.e., a lunge)?" We also sometimes -- very rarely -- do tours de fini in sur le cou de pied -- actually in the position we call coupe, which is at the ankle , heel forward, but not wrapped -- sous-sus, then 7 consecutively to hte right, close back, soussus, 7 to the left, without putting hte foot down.... We do tours de fini at the end of almost EVERY class, from fifth, arms center. When they're done in "coupe," we do arms in second and flex our wrists just for fun.... they are fun. so that kind of shoots my little theory, because that's certainly not a fouette....

Somehow, I've got it in my head that the term pirouette is in fact reserved for releve turns, and that pique turns are called pique turns, whether they're inside or outside ("step-ups") or in attitude or arabesque or whatever position..... I don't know what the dictionary would say, but that's the usage I've experienced ..... in fact, it seems that "pirouette" is always applied to a turn that starts by springing from two feet to one foot onto point (or demi-pointe) which leads me to wonder, if all pirouettes are versions of sissonnes-to-pointe that turn......

any hopethat thye'll come to san Francisco?

if that's a grand jete fouette, what's a revoltade?

well, Glebb, you were onto somehting Cranko's is the first to come out after Zeffirelli's ROmeo and Juliet, which REALLY changed everybody's understanding of who r and j are -- Ashton's -- no I didn't see it, but I've seen pictures, like Tudor's _- didn't see that either, but I've seen the pictures -- are from an era when R and J were thought of as being kinda like Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard, which is more like Ulanova than a modern teen-aged girl.... re ashton's Alexandra might know -- it was for the DANES, wsn't it?If anybody would still know it, it would be somebody there, righ?

love that chute allongee..... very nice arms on Corella, too. Baryshnikov used to use arms like that -- beautiful

pas de bourree fleuret -- use it in a dance!

Eric Hoisington was magnificent as the featured dancer in the triumphal march from Aida a few years back at the SF Opera, along with DOlora Zadek (the Amneris) the most exciting thing in hte show....

with respect, Hans, my teachers call it coupe (they reserve sur le cou de pied for the wrapped foot, and don't make a distinction re the position in back).... they also often say plie when they mean fondu.... it's verbal shorthand, and perhaps a West Coast idiom.... "Bournonville pas de bourree" is probably a good term to use in posts like this. I actually respect the usefulness of "hobble step" as a term you could use while working teaching a variations class -- it's not a mouthful, it's vivid, it IS the step you'd have to do if your ankles were confined somehow, and I suspect it is what Americans have called it for a while....

I would love to read Fokine on hte subject-- Helgi Tomasson has used it in some of his choreography, if I remember right. I'll concede, it IS a strange-looking step when you first see it, even when a Sylphide does it.... low-coupe is a beautiful thing, but it's on the way out all over -- at NYCB they do coupe well above the ankle.... Sally teaches it still, as do all the teachers at BBT, and it's in general use in hte Bay Area... entrechats used to be done in coupe -- in fact, that's where the names come from -- entrechat trois is "three coupes" -- and Italian changements, which stay in coupe, is the way changements used to be......

i don't know what else to call it -- that's what Sally called it, when she taught Bournonville variations---- it's like a paddle turn that doesn't turn but travels sideways...... the thing is it's a tiny step that stays in fondu, 6-8 quick steps (as if you did bourrees that weren't on pointe but "stayed in plie," with the knees quite bent the whole time) -- if you've seen much Bournonville you'll have seen it -- men do it, women do it -- very commonly it will lead into a grand jete in second position or in attitude

I love this thread -- so glad to see it back in use........ Another characteristic of Bournonville style is hte importance of the low coupe -- on relevee or in fondu, it is a beautiful line, and Bournonville uses it a LOT. There are lots of pirouettes, for women and men, in sur le coup de pied or coupe, and many combinations will end with a petite jete that ends in that characteristic large diamond shape, with the knees beautifully open -- it will then close in fifth as the legs stretch. The hobble step -- who else ever uses this? on sees it s LOT in Bournonville, as a prelude (usually) to a big jump. The hobble step stays in this position, like a bourree in coupe, knees beautifully turned-out and open generously....

Anybody who hasn't seen this, prepare yourselves -- it's really old-fashioned, but it's REALLY wonderful. The swans move FAST, and the White Swan is a rather quick andante, and really DANCED -- the violin solo has a beat to it, about heart-beat speed -- the lifts are only shoulder-height, the extensions are not not high, but hte whole thing is a fantastic piece of characterization within the bounds of formal classicism -- Fonteyn plays a woman who does not want to be a swan. Details of her dancing are marvellous -- her head positions, the action in th back of the neck in arabesque -- and the huge back bend in attitude, which is so dramatic in the restrained overall performance that it feels like you see her at that moment deciding to put her fate in his hands..... Don't miss it....

I got tears in my eyes. I loved the way Donald O'Connor danced -- I prefer him , actually, to Gene Kelly -- well, this is no time to be comparing one dancer to another, it's just the truth, that i n SInging in hte Rain, when the three of htem are dancing together, it's O'Connor I'm always watching -- He was so graceful, playful, heavenly, the way he danced. Everybody else is working so hard, he's playing. It really made me happy, such joyful dancing. A lovely, lovely spirit.

I think it's a terrific piece of writing! I expect to see it in collections of essays used as examples for college composition classes, in the vein of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," except that Swift maintains a completely consistent irony all the way through and is writing about something he is MUCH more passionately identified with (the starvation of hte people of Ireland) than Ms Aloff had to hand. It probably IS fair to say that she came to the show wit h a lot of baggage -- but all critics always do, they're -- or we are, for I'm a critic, too -- concerned with the state of the art as well as with this particular instance of it, including the state of the discourse ABOUT the art -- and at the moment, as the art itself declines (the Golden Age probably ended with Balanchine's death, and the Silver Age may have gone with the death of Joffrey) the conditions for WRITING about it are deteriorating even faster.... and Ms Aloff herself recently took a slam from the very capitalistic, survival of the fittest publishing economy we've got now. Ms Aloff has re-entered the fray with this article, and I'm thrilled to see her back and in fighting shape-- it's like having Sir lancelot back in the lists (or maybe I should say Hermione, who scored 112% on the Transformations exam). She may have ridden in less as Leigh's champion than on his back -- but there is no way she could plausibly have argued that his concert was a turning point in hte history of ballet, and the best use she could have made of his show is to champion the pleasures of well-made, civilized classical entertainment against the raucous thrills of avant-cliche.

re Horiuchi -- there was another issue -- he was not very musical. I saw NYCB twice during their run in Berkeley in hte late 80's; in 3rd movement of Symphony in C, one night there was Peter Boal, the other cast was Gen Horiuchi -- I may have dreamt this, it was so long ago --but I remember feeling that Horiuchi was bounding all over the stage in a fascinating way but it wasn't ballet, and it wasn't THE ballet...... Boal had BEEN the ballet.... (can't remember who the ladies were). I'm sure there are roles suited to Horiuchi, and I'd bet Balanchine could have made some for him we'd have all loved.... Is he still dancing?

Gurn has to see the sylph -- I think he can see her because he is in love